


To Dream Of Home

by Nokomis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-15
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 10:04:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arya misses Winterfell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Dream Of Home

**Author's Note:**

> Set during season one/A Game of Thrones. Written for a prompt by Eustacia_vye. <3

“I miss Winterfell,” Arya announces at breakfast, staring at the stupid platter of fruit and honeyed cakes that they were served instead of the hearty foods they’d grown up eating for breakfast. She was going to be starving by the time lunch was prepared, and it was hard enough to evade Syrio’s sword when she wasn’t being distracted by a grumbling stomach.

“Why?” Sansa asks in her most aggrieved voice, like everything Arya does is somehow repulsive and foreign to her. “It’s lovely here.”

Sansa picks up another piece of melon and bites delicately into it.

Arya sighs heavily. “Everything was better there. Except for my dancing lessons, of course.”

She loves her mother, but she knows perfectly well that the only reason she gets to have water dancing lessons is that her mother isn’t here to say no. She wonders sometimes what it would have been like at Winterfell if her father had let her train with her brothers – she’s better than Bran was, for sure, even if thinking that now gives her a strange, guilty feeling in her belly – even though one of Syrio’s lessons taught her that dwelling on what could have been is a useless waste of energy unless she is learning from her mistakes.

“But everything is so _beautiful_ here,” Sansa argues. Arya’s not sure if her sister is as dumb as she sounds or if she’s just pretending really hard that everything here is okay. 

_She lost her wolf,_ Arya thinks, not for the first time, and wonders what it means that she’s separated from hers. Bran’s saved him, but when she tries to picture Nymeria in this place it just feels wrong.

“It’s ugly,” Arya insists, poking angrily at her breakfast. “I wish Father had never brought us here.”

Sansa lets out a huff and excuses herself from the breakfast table. Arya loiters for a few more minutes before deciding that Syrio might be ready for the day’s lesson. She’s not sure what he does when he’s not teaching her – he’s never mentioned anything, she doesn’t know where he stays or even how her father found him in the first place – but he always arrives at different times, and Arya must guess when she is supposed to be there.

She hops down the steps of the Tower of the Hand on one foot, proud when she makes it to the bottom without having to set down both feet.

From there she runs down the back corridor – the one intended for servants, which is narrower and doesn’t have any fancy scrollwork on the walls but is the quickest way from one end of the Keep to the other – barely dodging women carrying heavy buckets of steaming water, but she makes it to the room where Syrio holds his dancing lessons before he gets there.

She looks around, trying to _see_ the way Syrio tells her, but the room is the same as it was yesterday. She wonders what Syrio does when he enters the room, and realizes that she could find out.

She scurries to the window, and hops on the sill. There’s a narrow ledge, much wider than anything Bran used to run on back at Winterfell, on the outside. She climbs down on it, and ducks her head, _listening_ and waiting to see if she can surprise Syrio.

She waits, patient as a cat stalking its prey, and finally she hears footsteps. They are light and near-silent, but Arya has been training herself and she notices them. There is a light scuffing sound that she recognizes as Syrio turning on the ball of his foot, and she can picture him surveying the room and wondering where his student was.

She dared lift her head enough to peer over the windowsill. Syrio smiled at her from the center of the room, and asks, “Boy, are you a cat or a pigeon?”

“A cat,” she replies, launching herself over the windowsill and into the room. She skids to a stop right before Syrio, and attempts a short choppy swing with her wooden sword.

Syrio easily blocks it. “So you wish to surprise your oppontent.”

“Cats don’t announce their presence to pigeons,” Arya says. She’s watched enough of the castle cats hunt while attempting to capture them herself that she knows surprise is the only advantage she has.

“And who are you wishing to surprise?” Syrio continues.

_The Queen_ , Arya doesn’t say. _Joffrey._ The thought of Micah and what happened on the Trident still haunts her, still makes her hate Sansa with every breath, no matter what their father said. “No one.”

“No one is hard to fight,” Syrio tells her, easily knocking her down with a swing of his wooden sword. 

“I want to go home,” Arya says. Syrio might understand. “Do you miss Braavos?”

“I cannot change what is, little one,” Syrio says kindly. “Nor can you. Home is where you make it.”

“I make my home at Winterfell,” Arya replies stubbornly. “And on my way home I can find Nymeria…”

She cuts herself off. No one was to know that Nymeria still wandered the Trident. Arya herself isn’t entirely sure that it’s true; she just knows that she dreams of her wolf sometimes in the night, and wakes up with the smell of the riverlands in her nose.

Syrio looks at her in a way he never has before, and Arya isn’t sure if it’s kindness or pity. “Perhaps we should work on your footwork, if you are so eager to run, child.”

Arya concentrates hard on what Syrio shows her, but she cannot shake the ache in her bones. She thinks of the summer snows they left behind at the Neck, and the hot pools in the godswood that her brothers are probably playing in even as she practices evading Syrio’s sword.

She knows her father would just tell her that she’s homesick, that she will get used to this southern city. She knows there’s nothing that can be done. 

But still she hopes that somehow, some way, she’ll be sent back home. She’s a Stark of Winterfell, and she wants nothing more than to be where she belongs when the winter comes.


End file.
